Overview
In Unfamiliar Journeys, photographer Alan McKernan takes us on a strange and beautiful excursion through his hometown, the ancient and ever-changing city of Liverpool. McKernan has spent the past ten years documenting the city’s evolution, and these photographs reflect both the grandeur and decay of this modern urban landscape.
Not a conventional collection of Liverpool’s architectural riches, Unfamiliar Journeys instead captures deserted warehouses, boarded-up butcher shops, and the graceful lines of a historic cathedral buttressed by a concrete roadway. Signs of Liverpool’s recent economic boom—billboards, towering high-rises, and skeletal construction cranes—are scattered nearby. There is something off-kilter about these photographs, and it takes a moment to realize that, despite the setting, there are no people in McKernan’s vision of the city. His deliberate use of traditional, silver-based black-and-white film enhances this feeling of eerie enchantment.
McKernan is a master at making the familiar feel distant, even outside of time. An utterly unique record of this city’s history, Unfamiliar Journeys is also a thoughtful look at current developments and a haunting personal vision of what city life may become.